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S. Ramachander

Communicating involves stating your ideas and listening to other people's views as well!

Most executives would probably admit readily that what they actually do most of the time at work is talk: meetings, interspersed with e-mails and phone calls, and papers about more meetings. Communication, whether face to face or via some instrument is both the fuel and the lubricant of organisational life. The more effective person is often the one who is the better communicator.

Yet, communicating is a frustratingly difficult art to master. Courses constantly remind everyone from CEOs to MBA students about the myriad pitfalls and problems that organisational communication is fraught with. Few programmes manage to produce any real change in behaviour, though they give some pointers, concepts and techniques to guide effective communications. One of the principal reasons why such an eminently worthwhile activity meets with so little success could be the fragmentary way in which we approach it. Training usually is piecemeal, divided into either correct use of language and appropriate written and oral style, or understanding the physical setting and the technicalities of a good presentation, or the possible hurdles and the subtle nuances of the psychology of persuasion.

Yet another basic reason might well be narrowing the definition of communication to merely persuasive, efficient information transfer. What managements want first, or most of the time is to get their meaning across, without having to face too much resistance or difficult questions.

The persistent difficulties that we face in group-work are, however, not separate from the style, nature and content of communication or indeed the culture of an organisation. They are deeply interconnected. It would be true to say that how people meet and talk to one another, and how well they do it, is itself one of the defining elements of an organisation's culture.

Problems that arise in relationships go beyond the verbal level. They cannot be easily treated unless conversations are friendly, friction-free, two-way and open. Such conversations depend on the ability to get a group to think together, which has been recently described as the art of dialogue that drives and underlies getting teams to work together.

The roots of the word `dialogue' come from the Greek dia meaning `through' and logos, which translates as `meaning' or simply `the word'. Dialogue is not negotiation nor aimed at `getting to a yes'.

Dialogue is distinguished from debate/argument, which has two or more sides, with one emerging the winner. Typically, the other side, finding it difficult to concede victory, finds some flaw in the whole process and slinks away to nurse its wounds in grumpy silence! Dialogue on the other hand assumes a genuine desire to put the question in the centre, over and above the questioners.

In essence dialogue is a flow of meaning, a conversation that has a centre but no sides. All revolutionary and peaceful change such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ending of apartheid, or the truce efforts in Ireland arose out of a deep and meaningful conversation that began with neither prejudice nor seeking winners and losers.

Some of the champions of this powerful, emerging form of discourse are the late Dr David Bohm, the well-known physicist, Chris Argyris of Harvard and Peter Senge of MIT, amongst others. Bohm started a group expressly to study what happens in dialogue as a scientist would any natural phenomenon, drawing on his understanding as a physicist of the processes of human perception. It was the insight that the observer is an involved entity in the process of observation and affects the thing observed that drew him first to J Krishnamurti, with whom he established a deep friendship, practising this art of dialogue for several years. Their method of dialogue is one of relentless and systematic enquiry, dropping all trappings of accumulated knowledge and received wisdom.

At the heart of good dialogue is a simple but profound instrument to which we pay so little attention, the capacity to listen. It is an expansive and inclusive process, listening is not just to the words, but also without and beyond the spoken word. We listen to deeper meanings in the interstices between sounds, and to both our own thinking and that of the other. Such a "listening out of silence, without a centre," as Krishnamurti has repeatedly demonstrated, creates both inner and outer silence, and this may open the door to the possibility of reconciling that which is divided, and making it whole. It is significant that people as different as Argyris, Bohm and Senge agree with Krishnamurti that this wholeness alone can heal the differences that plague human relationships. A leading management thinker and a proponent of the notion of learning organisations, Peter Senge has not only written and practised in this area extensively, and deals with the nature of problem-solving in a dialogue with David Bohm in his book The Fifth Discipline.

Following him and at an entirely practical level William Isaacs, also at MIT, has taken this new form of conversation forward, constituting a group called Dia Logos, and actually tested it out evidently with some success. It has been applied to resolving thorny issues between the top management of the US auto industry and United Auto Workers (UAW). It can be a way of addressing the deep-rooted conflicts, disputes and divisions that separate nation states and communities as well as groups such as unions and managers. The book, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, (Doubleday, New York, 1999) rests on the underlying healing and constructive properties of conversations between people, which is an age old device for humanity to listen to and to stay in contact with one another. And the problems we face today arise from wrong conversations that do not result in `thinking together' but rather at cross purposes, juxtaposing arguments in a confrontational way.

Essentially, dialogue removes the egoistic and emotional content of discourse and removes the concept of winner and loser. Communication at both verbal and non-verbal levels are involved. Trust, which is at the heart of any agreement, can only be fully established between the participants to the dialogue when the sources of discord and disagreement are removed. In a work situation, this raises a deep-rooted paradox. Look at it this way. All organisations are assemblies of people with a common purpose, where the success of one ought to be by definition the success of another.

And yet, every organisation is riddled with inter-personal rivalry, petty jealousies and the inevitable tendencies of deviousness and manipulation. The results we are all too familiar with are groupism, politics, gossip, and bad-mouthing... failure of the very spirit of co-operative behaviour. We then go to great lengths to try out ever new and different ways of bringing people together through lecturing them, by outdoor exercises, boot-camps and workshops — to develop morale and motivation, teamwork, collaboration, group cohesion and so on. And yet, the way we design organisational structure and systems of rewards and punishments appear to achieve precisely the opposite of what we want! So the insight we need is to appreciate that these problems can be solved by addressing not just the disputed issues themselves but also the very structuring of relationships within the organisation.

Thus we end up treating the skills of communication themselves as yet another bundle of tricks to be used cleverly in order to get one's way at the expense of another person, function, department or entity! What we fail to address is the fundamental and underlying need to de-emphasise everything that promotes inter-personal, competitive rivalry and distrust.

So long as we do not see a way forward in developing the atmosphere of trust and willingness to cooperate but instead reward on the basis of what is known in academic circles as a relative or curve-grading method, performance or success of one employee will continue to be seen as one that is best ensured by thwarting or preventing another's. A poor way to achieve internal cohesion. There is no sense in thereafter trying to get a buy-in to some generalised notions called corporate beliefs and values and run more value workshops and group learning sessions to `instil' them in the employee!

People will behave only in the way that they think contributes to their being rewarded. If we want to have open and constructive relationships, we need to change the feel and atmosphere of the workplace — not just run training programmes on how to communicate to be more effective!

The author is Director, ACME, Chennai

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